I wouldn't be so sure she'll win. The savaging is good fun, certainly, and rarely has there been a target so richly deserving. But the tone is austere and severe, not nearly so rollicking as Pete Wells takedown of Guy Fieri's new restaurant. Here, for example, is Wells on Fieri:

How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess
up, turn out so deeply unlovable? Why augment tortilla chips with fried
lasagna noodles that taste like nothing except oil? Why not bury those
chips under a properly hot and filling layer of melted cheese and
jalapeños instead of dribbling them with thin needles of pepperoni and
cold gray clots of ground turkey?

And Heller on Rushdie:

A man living under threat of death for nine years is not to be blamed
for occasionally characterizing his plight in grandiloquent terms. But
one would hope that when recollecting his emotions in freedom and
safety, he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own
bombast. Hindsight, alas, has had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s
magisterial amour propre. An unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as
an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book.

I mean face it, the latter has a kind of majesty about it but it's not the kind of punishment that is going to score the victim a moment on Leno (question for eager UB intern--has Rushdie ever been on Leno? I suppose so, but a desultory search does not confirm it).Meanwhile, say what you like about Heller's handiwork, the NYRB cannot have been surprised. Best I can tell, Heller has written only one other review for the journal; it was the piece last fall dismssing Naomi Wolf's Vaginaas " a shoddy piece of work, full of childlike generalizations and dreary, feminist auto-think." Heller is also the lady who said of her own work “I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters." She adds: “if you want to find friends, go to a cocktail
party.” Fine, but if she and Salman Rushdie are there at the same time, I dearly hope I can be on hand to observe.